Racism and World War II: Personal Memories, 1940s, by Carter Jefferson

From MemoryArchive

Who: Carter Jefferson
What: Racism in WII
When: 1940s
Where: Dallas, Texas

Racism and World War II: Personal Memories

by Carter Jefferson

Memories are not the best primary sources, but the vast wordage about racism in connection with World War II that has been emitted in recent times has moved me to offer some memories, for what they're worth. I have tried to remember my own feelings about race and those of people I knew before, during, and immediately after the war, and I should like to try to convey some of that to you. I have read a lot about the thirties and the war, and I think many people don't quite understand the feelings of Americans in general and the people I knew in particular at that time, and such feelings mattered tremendously in the way the war was perceived and fought. If anyone finds what I write interesting, I'd like to hear other people's tales about this sort of thing wherever they were in those years.

Start from this premise--where I was raised, in Dallas, Texas, we were provincial in every sense of the word. The mainstream (a word we didn't use then in this sense) was Southern white Protestant. Not Anglo-Saxon, since this included many people of Scottish, German, and Protestant Irish, and, to a lesser extent, French Protestant descent. This mainstream group was not homogeneous--educated people thought differently from the uneducated majority (probably half the population finished high school, and less than ten per cent went to college at all). I was from the "educated" class and these remarks deal with the attitudes of that group. My mother was a college graduate and my father graduated from high school and became a self-educated intellectual--he was a newspaper editor. From what I knew then of the attitudes of the less educated, and, of course, I knew, and was kin to, many of them, the attitudes of the less educated were much the same as those of the educated except far more harsh and less nuanced. What I intend to describe here are attitudes of the educated class in this milieu.

We definitely thought in terms of us and them. Most of us only actually knew people of four "outgroups"--Jews, Catholics, African-Americans (then referred to as Negroes by the educated and niggers by the uneducated; we knew they hated the word nigger, but thought they didn't mind Negro), and Mexicans. I may have met an Asian, but can't remember it if I did. I knew no foreigners and no recent immigrants, though I did know old people who were foreign-born and spoke with accents (mostly Germans).

We more or less distrusted anyone who wasn't part of our group, and some we disliked intensely.

Among the most discussed and excoriated were Easterners and Yankees. Yankee meant anyone not from one of the former Confederate states. California, for example, was included. We didn't know any, but we hated their guts (except for Roosevelt, who was different). We cheered lustily when the Civil War veterans lurched past in parades. The Yankees beat us in the the War because of their industry, not their courage or fighting ability; they were a bunch of panty-waisted tea-sippers, they were rich and they were dishonest and they were not to be trusted. My Scotch-Irish grandmother used to tell about two traveling salesmen who came to her farm one day selling silver polish. She bought some, tried it after they left, and the silver melted. "I bet those boys were Republicans," she said. (Republican and Yankee were synonyms.)

On the other hand, when World War II started we had to be on the same side, so we put up with them, while Southerners won the war.

We tolerated Jews--some were important people in the city, and they were numerous. As far as I knew, most Jews lived in South Dallas and went to Forest Avenue High School. A few lived in Highland Park, generally considered a rich area, and went to Highland Park High School. As a student at Forest High (1939-1941), I knew a lot of Jews, liked some of them and disliked others, about the same as I liked some gentiles and disliked others. Being so closely associated with them I lost much of the anti-Jewish feeling that I had when I entered high school. That feeling was not particularly strong in any case--they were not bad, or inferior, they were different. There was a Reform synagogue across the street from my (Presbyterian) church, and we were scandalized because we believed that they drank beer on Saturday nights in the synagogue. Beer was pretty bad anywhere, but in church! I pretty much retained the stereotype that was common in my group--Jews were smart and they were noisy. I don't think many people thought in terms of Fagin, the greasy crooked Jew. The stereotype persisted in spite of obvious exceptions. The guy who taught me the manual of arms after school when I wanted to transfer from the band to the line ROTC was quiet and seemed to be of average intelligence, an ordinary nice guy except that he was a Jew. (Thanks, David!) But in fact my best friends were all from my own white Protestant group. To me and most of my friends, Jews were strange but basically okay.

Catholics were even stranger than Jews--probably because white, non-Mexican Catholics were not numerous. I knew only one Catholic family. We thought of them almost exactly as we did Jews--strange, but okay. I certainly did not think of them as potentially disloyal, owing allegiance to the Pope, or any of the other things I have since heard that some people thought. (Now that I am one, my attitude hasn't changed much--they're strange, but okay. So are most Protestants.)

Mexicans were another matter. The ones we knew were poor and lived in their ghetto. (We didn't know the word "ghetto," but spoke of "Little Mexico" and "Niggertown.") Mexicans spoke Spanish. They were really very different. They were stereotyped as lazy ("Mañana"), but I had seen plenty of them working hard at menial jobs--in road construction, yard work, etc. We also had learned about the war against Mexico for Texas independence (1836), and, I think, had learned a certain mild contempt for them since we had beaten them in that war. Had a Mexican who spoke English well and dressed as we did been in our school, I am sure he would have been treated pretty much as anyone else, but looked on like a Jew or Catholic--strange.

Blacks were also very different, but there was no question about the existence of racism. This was in the days of Jim Crow, and we thought blacks were an inferior race, period. They were okay, if they "kept their place." We thought they could work hard, but wouldn't if they could avoid it. Nobody seemed to notice that everybody they knew of any color was the same way.

Then there were our opinions of foreigners, none of which we had ever met.

Finns were wonderful--they paid their war debts. The United States had loaned large sums of money to the Allies in World War I, and, as far as we knew, nobody had paid that money back but the Finns. That was absolutely all we knew about the Finns, but they obviously were fine people. Of course, we had never met a Finn.

Germans were efficient and tended to be ruthless and hard (this was before the war). One of my grandfathers was German and he fit the stereotype. So did my mother, come to think of it. Being in this country for a couple of generations seemed to rehabilitate them, but the Germans in Germany were Huns, Heinies, the Boche, not to be trusted at all. After all, we had just recently fought a war against them. Still, we all believed the stories about the Christmas truce in WW I; they were what they they were, but not sub-human. As World War II went on, people tended to distinguish between soldiers and Nazis, I now think naively. Nazis were bad, but German soldiers were just like anybody else except misled. We thought what the Germans had done to the Jews was very bad, but, again, we tended to attribute that to the leadership, not the people.

As the war ended and we heard about the concentration camps we were shocked and puzzled--how could they? They were Christians like us, but they'd done these awful things. Nobody then doubted that they had done them--the skeletons on the front cover of Life magazine were not to be disbelieved. (We tended to believe journalists in those days--that was because most of them deserved it, then.) Anyhow, what the Germans did to the Jews changed my mind about them, and I concluded there was something really wrong in their makeup; I didn't believe the German people had not known of the camps. A few years later (1952) I was in Austria and Germany for several months and talked to a lot of people (in German), and came away believing that I was right, there was something really wrong with them. But my attitude couldn't be racism, because they were quite clearly not only of the same race I was, but I was half German myself. Incidentally, if we had dropped the A-Bomb on them, even before we knew about the concentration camps, I would have been delighted. One of my friends got frozen feet in the Bulge, and older brothers of friends had been killed in the war,

The British. I was a hopeless Anglophile as soon as I could read (still am, and all the really awful things I've learned about them since haven't cured me), even though I did feel that they had been unreasonably stubborn in the 1770's. Most Southerners liked the English better than they liked Yankees for Civil War reasons. Churchill and Murrow won them great sympathy in my circles. But they did talk funny, and sounded like the people we called queers (whom we had heard of but hadn't met).

The French were very strange; they ate weird food and slicked down their hair, and their language sounded effeminate. They were a little sleazy--"French postcards" were the common porno pictures (we thought). But their women--oo, la, la! All the WWI veterans liked French women a lot, and they talked about them. We were shocked, but at the same time not too surprised, when the Germans ran over them so easily. Obviously their moral fibre had deteriorated since Napoleon's day. People talked a lot about moral fibre in those days.

Italians (I didn't know any) were kind of like Frenchmen, although for some reason not be taken as seriously. We believed they wouldn't fight very hard.

The Japanese, we all knew, were great imitators--they made all sorts of inferior cheap stuff. They were little yellow men. We had heard about the Yellow Peril, but up till WWII I thought that meant the Chinese, if they ever managed to get organized and make progress. (Progress was highly desirable in those days.) Nobody had any doubt, from Pearl Harbor on, that we would defeat them. On the other hand, we generally believed that Asians held little regard for life, and wouldn't hesitate to sacrifice millions of men if necessary, so they might give us some trouble along the way. We heard about the atrocities they committed--I had heard about the Rape of Nanking--and when the war came and we later began to hear about atrocities against their American prisoners we were not surprised. Incidentally, I and others I knew felt uneasy about the West Coast removal of the Japanese. If they were citizens, they were citizens, and should not have been bothered--we really prized citizenship, and thought it should protect us, and them, from arbitrary government oppression. But what could I do about it, or any of us? By the time we heard about it, it was a fait accompli, and there was a war on, you know. Believe it or not, we thought that becoming citizens somehow made people different--they were no longer German or Japanese, but American. I was particularly sensitive on the subject because my German grandfather had suffered minor indignities early in WWI.

I found it much easier to forgive the Japanese their "sneakiness" and their atrocities than I did the Germans theirs. The Japanese weren't Christians; they weren't, in our opinion, civilized. They were really different, and therefore what seemed right to them wouldn't necessarily seem right to us. In other words, the Germans should have known better, but no one should have expected the Japanese to act any differently. I still haven't changed my mind; I still avoid German cars but did buy a Japanese car back when ours got so lousy, and the place is littered with Japanese electronics. But I still don't trust the Japanese or the German nation, either one. Individuals are different from nations. (Don't trust any of the others, either, including us.)

Back then there was a concept called "national character" that was widely acknowledged. It naturally amounted to formalized stereotyping, but it was more subtle, and, I think, less harsh and unfeeling than racism. (Incidentally, no one I knew ever used the term "racism" until about 1960--the term most commonly used was "race prejudice.") Are there different kinds of racism? I think there may be, but most important, I think that our feelings about the Japanese were of the same kind as our feelings about the British, Germans, French--and Yankees--and not the same kind as our feelings about Afro-Americans. They dealt with something we called national character, which certainly involved prejudice, but wasn't quite the same as racism. It involved what you might expect of a nation and of individuals from the country concerned. Ideas of national character always included complimentary aspects--hard-working Germans, musical Italians, great French cooking, and such things.

Remember, this is my memory, and I'm talking about the way I think I felt nearly sixty years ago. Nobody else is to blame but me if it's not useful or is in some way offensive. It is not meant as an apology or as an endorsement of the views described, but as a description of a mindset. It should not be taken as an attempt to describe American feelings, but only those of the time and place discussed. I might mention that many of my opinions have changed over the years, in case that's not obvious.